XIX
COLONEL HALKET ADDRESSES AN AUDIENCE
On the evening of the fifteenth of May there was more purpose of movement in the streets of New Rome than was customary in the late and lingering twilight of a May day. The yellow Halket Library, with its Moorish towers and arches, standing on the smoky hill-top, gathered to itself the rays from the sun expiring across the river; they shone out from a suddenly blazing ember of cloud, tinseled for a moment a few little houses on the lower slope, and then, fading slowly upward, brightened the terraced steps and yellow walls and red tiled roof of the building that, as Colonel Halket said, crowned New Rome. And at the hour when the building seemed thus to be drawing and concentrating to itself the dwindling light, it was also summoning the toilers from all parts of the town. From the side streets they flowed into the main ascending thoroughfare that usually in the evening reclined quiet and empty against the slope of the hill; they mounted slowly to the terraced steps, and there the women and children who sometimes accompanied the men stood aside or strolled about on the green lawn, while the men continued on upwards and disappeared into one of the dark Moorish arches.
The occasion was one of some ceremony, for nearly all the men wore coats, even though it was a warm evening, and many of them had gone home from the works an hour before displaying undershirt and suspenders. Collars were less frequent than cutaways, however,—as if, having made a concession in one matter, a man was entitled to insist upon an equivalent in another. One might have remarked a grim, an almost intentional lack of refinement,
